Max Wertheimer: biography of one of the founders of Gestalt theory

There are many currents within psychology, and Gestalt is one of the most important, with more than a century of existence.

This time we will focus on the life of one of the creators of that school, Max Wertheimer, reviewing the most important life episodes of him, the publications and research that had the most impact on other authors, and other events of interest.

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Short biography of Max Wertheimer

The author Max Wertheimer was born in 1880 in the city of Prague, at that time belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He belonged to a wealthy family of Jewish origin. His father, Wilhelm Wertheimer, was a teacher and economist. On her side, Rosa Zwicker, her mother, had enjoyed the privileges of an elite education. The marriage had another son, Walter, in addition to Max.

Therefore, the educational environment in the Wertheimers' home was optimal for the development of the little ones. An atmosphere of intellectual and debate was promoted, even of a political and philosophical nature. Both Walter and Max were also provided with classical and musical training. From a very young age, they already read authors like the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

As for formal education, Max Wertheimer attended a Piarist school, and therefore Catholic, despite being Jewish, something that was relatively common in these countries. After completing the early stages of his training, he attended the Royal Imperial New City, before entering the university.

Although at first he enrolled in law at the University of Prague, later he decided to focus on what really interested him, which was the philosophy and behavior of the human being., that is to say, psychology, so he decided to move to the University of Berlin to formalize those studies.

Thus he had the opportunity to share an institution with a whole generation of future figures in psychology and other fields, among which were, apart from Max Wertheimer himself, others such as the ethnomusicologist, Erich von Hornbostel, or the experimental psychologists, Georg Elias Müller, Friederich Schumann and Carl Stumpf.

Max he continued his training, this time at the University of Würzburg, where he carried out his doctoral thesis, studying the polygraph, or lie detector, and its possible applications to evaluate the credibility of the testimony.

The beginning of your professional career

Already as a doctor, Max Wertheimer began to practice teaching and research. He began working at an institute in Frankfurt and later transferred to the university in that same city. From 1903 to 1916, he would develop his career in this region of Germany. During that stage he was also called up to fight in the First World War, reaching the rank of captain.

The second stage in his professional life took place at the Berlin Psychological Institute, in which he would spend no less than 13 years. Throughout those years, he met Anna Caro, whom he married and had four children. The marriage began in 1923 and ended in 1942, when they divorced.

As for his work in Berlin, it lasted until in 1929 he got a teaching position at the University of Frankfurt, so he returned to that institution. Max Wertheimer taught at this institution, while He was continuing some of the research that he had started at the University of Berlin and that would mark the beginning of Gestalt psychology.

But, in the year 1933 something happened that would mark, not only his life, but that of the majority of people in Europe, and practically the world. The Nazis came to power in Germany.

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Exile to the United States

Max Wertheimer was aware that, coming from a Jewish family, his figure as a teacher and even as a citizen was about to be called into question in Nazi Germany. Therefore, he made up his mind to leave Europe for the United States, thanks to the facilities that the consulate of this country in Prague gave to many emigrants.

That is how, in September 1933, Max Wertheimer and his family arrived in New York. For all intents and purposes, they became US citizens, so from that moment on, he had both that nationality and the German nationality, which was that of his native land.

Also, thanks to the career path he had accumulated, he had no problem rejoining again as teacher, this time at the New School for Social Research, which would be the place where he would develop the rest of his race. Other pioneers of Gestalt psychology, such as Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kölher, had also emigrated to America.

In his new stage in the United States, was in close contact with both these authors and others who stayed in Europe.

Productive thinking and later years

Max Wertheimer's health was seriously compromised, so since he had to leave Germany at the age of 53, he was only going to live another decade in his new country. During those years, In addition to working as a teacher and taking up his research, he dedicated himself to preparing what would be his only work, entitled "Productive Thought".

This volume was intended to explain thought processes from the perspective of Gestalt psychology, of which Max Wertheimer was one of the creators. He distinguished between productive and reproductive thinking. While the first represented the mental capacity to generate new ideas, the other is in charge of repeating existing data in the brain.

To generate productive thinking, one starts from the knowledge that the subject has stored. From these data, a reasoning is carried out that gives rise to those new ideas that did not previously exist in his mind. Max Wertheimer used the principles of classical logic to understand any question to its deepest level.

Equally, He claimed that according to productive thinking, it was not a good idea to follow closed rules in a stubborn way to try to solve a problem, because sometimes they can become to a greater extent an impediment than an aid for that purpose.

The postulates that Max Wertheimer left in his work, Productive Thinking, continue to be of great relevance today in matters related to the generation of knowledge schemes.

This was the last great contribution of this author, before finally passing away in 1943, just after publishing the book. The cause of his death was a heart attack. He was 63 years old.

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Max Wertheimer and the Gestalt

But without any doubt, Max Wertheimer's reputation is linked to the founding of the Gestalt psychological school. The foundation of this current is that perception uses mechanisms to automatically recognize patterns in sets of simple elements. Basically, these patterns can be based on the proximity of these elements, on their similarity, on the continuity they have, depending on the figure they create with respect to the background or if they generate a closure.

The first time Max Wertheimer thought in these terms was in 1910, when he was teaching in the city of Frankfurt. He was on a train trip when he noticed the way in which he perceived and unthinkingly grouped certain visual stimuli. That was the origin of one of the most important currents in psychology.

Another of the principles that he established for Gestalt is that the final result generated by the set of elements is different from them. That is, the pattern generated by the group gives rise to a construct that is beyond the parts that compose it, it has an identity of its own.

The Gestalt current, developed by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, arose in contrast to the perception studies of the prevailing school at that time, which was the elementalist and the structuralist, whose maximum exponents were Wilhelm Wundt Y Edward titchener.

The Phi phenomenon of apparent motion

The other great contribution of Max Wertheimer was the description of a curious phenomenon, baptized as the phi phenomenon. What this author was referring to is the perception of an apparent movement, which in reality has no Instead, when lights on opposite sides alternate, one turning on when the other.

This alternation generates an illusion of movement in the viewer, who can perceive how the light is moving from one side to the other, since their mind completes automatically a pattern, interpreting that it is a single light that is constantly moving position, when in fact there are two that blink in a alternates.

Bibliographic references:

• Evans, R. B. (2005). Form and Substance: Max Wertheimer's Life and Work. PsycCRITIQUES,
• King, D.B., Wertheimer, M. (2005). Max Wertheimer and gestalt theory. Transaction Publishers.
• Luchins, A.S., Luchins, E.H. (1987). Max Wertheimer in America: 1933–1943: I. Gestalt Theory.
• Wertheimer, M. (2014). Max Wertheimer centennial celebration in Germany. History of psychology.
• Wertheimer, M. (2020). Max Wertheimer Productive Thinking. Springer.